Four Seasons for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, and piano quartet Op.123 (2013) c.18'00"
poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I. Spring
II. Summer
III. The Death of Autumn (I)
IV. The Death of Autumn (II)
V. Winter
VI. Mindful of You

Commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and the Celebrity Series of Boston with the generous support of the CMNW Commissioning Fund.

First performed on July 20, 2013 at Chamber Music Northwest, Portland, Oregon by Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano; David Shifrin, clarinet; Ida Kavafian, violin; Steve Tenenbom, viola; Peter Wiley, cello; and Pei Yao Wang, piano

ABOUT

Four Seasons, Op.123 for Mezzo-soprano, Clarinet and Piano Quartet was commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and the Celebrity Series of Boston, with the generous support of the CMNW Commissioning Fund. The first performance took place on July 20th, 2013 at Chamber Music Northwest with Sasha Cooke, David Shifrin and the members of Opus One.

The first order of business in writing a song cycle is, of course, finding an appropriate text. Having decided upon Edna St. Vincent Millay (whose poems I had wanted to set to music for many years but somehow never got around to) I gathered a number of poems that seemed likely possibilities. Millay returns again and again in her poetry to themes of the passage of time, of life and of romance. I knew that I wanted to set the well-known sonnet that begins “What lips my lips have kissed.” Once I noticed that several of the other poems I had chosen also made explicit mention of the four seasons, the final selection became easy.

The cycle opens with a poem titled “Spring,” a horror-filled meditation on mortality provoked by the coming of spring. This leads without pause to a setting of the untitled third of eight Sonnets first published in 1922, concerning the transience of love. The third and fourth songs are musically contrasting settings of the same poem, “The Death of Autumn,” transitioning from feelings of anger and horror in the first setting to acceptance and resignation in the second. The fifth song is a setting of the sonnet beginning “What lips my lips have kissed,” a meditation on past loves, and the cycle concludes with yet another untitled sonnet in which the poet carries the memory of a departed lover through the whole year.

REVIEWS

“I can think of no American composer who invests the traditional materials of music with the combination of originality and consistent expertise that Lowell Liebermann does…Right from this opening movement one was struck by the composer’s finesse in employing the assembled forces, prizing clarity in his instrumental textures…Winter may take the prize as the most arrestingly beautiful expanse of the set, its flickering refinementunderscoring the spirit of the poem…And yet, the epilogue…rivals it in exquisite effect, now perhaps recalling the lyricism of Barber. Suggesting points of contact between Liebermann’s cycle and certain acclaimed predecessors should not be taken to suggest that he does not posses an original voice. It means, rather, that he is attached to the trunk of a musical tree that has been sending out new branches for centuries and remains far from exhausted.”
James Keller, Santa Fe New Mexican

“Throughout this work, Liebermann weaves his instruments, including the voice, skillfully. The songs make an impact, or at least they did on me. In the margin of my program, I wrote a rare note: ”These babies might last.” “
The New Criterion